It must be summer: my fan is plugged in and under my desk, my hair's doing that red/blonde thing (ugh) and we suffered our first major ant incursion. Serves me right for not tracking down and destroying the source of the odd single ants I've been seeing around the place, I suppose, but I try to be a bit live and let live about ants since a friend told me about her friend who poured boiling water down an ant's nest that had been annoying her. The following morning she went out to discover that the surviving ants had left their boiled larvae stacked outside her door ... still on summer: I just ran into Phil the Bassist outside Macc House, and conversation suggests that this summer's Sunday Steamers are going to be lots of fun...

Sunday gig from The Feeling, freshly raddled from staying up all night trying to dance some feeling into their limbs at Wychwood, the festival that's too early to be warm even if the weather's good. Probably to interminable world beats if last year was anything to go by ... which might have explained the slow-late start. Appealing though -- especially the lead singer, with his David Byrne-ish gesturing, fey floppy cock rock posturing and funniest! guitar face! ever. What I'd not clocked from MTV was that they're all vocalists (except possibly the drummer) meaning every now and again the guitars being beaten back by thundering pianos and close vocal harmony, and the indy-boy posturing dissolving into something more mad cabaret. So while it started out ordinary enough, with lots of friendly fluffy songs about love, alcohol and nice cups of tea, perfect fare for the audience of teenage girls and their fathers/dates, it gradually picked up an accelerating strangeness -- culminating in a bouncy military recuiting song for a vast gay army called "Join Us" (declared by my companion to be "genius -- madness -- possibly the gayest song ever!) which apparently has to be saved for the second album, because it's a "bit shit". I think whoever advised them to that is uderestimating their audience, though: the bulky dad standing in front of me was bopping away hardest of all to that (with the added bonus that I didn't have to dance, I could just be gently bounced up and down by the shockwaves) and he wasn't the only one ...

Last but not least: you can click through for a closer look at an action figure being pressed into service for calibrating a PET scanner (cheers sparkymark) larger, more detailed pictures lie beyond the "next" button. How our group calibrated a PET scanner at a trade show...

action figure PET scan triptych - he comes, he is scanned, he returns an image.

EDIT: I see LJ's "fixing" of the broken switch-back-to-plain-text translates to, "and now everything's broken".

unfortunately the moths seem to be a relic of the Relationship Of Doom's flat. it's been almost two and a half years, but i recently unpacked some old junk and it seems that some of the little feckers woke up. i despair.